Keeper: One House, Three Generations, and a Journey Into Alzheimer's Read Online Free Page A

“Look at all that water.” Her voice is astonished.
    “Yes. We live here, out on the peninsula; the sea’s all around us. Do you remember coming here with us to live? We came last month. Do you remember?”
    “Edinburgh,” she says under her breath.
    “You used to live in Edinburgh, years ago. But then you moved up to Speyside, near our old house. Do you remember the bungalow? By the river?” She looks blank. “And now you live here, with us.”
    She looks at me, grim-faced. “That’s all very well, but they laugh at me, you know. Not you, I’m not talking about you, but the others. They look me up and down in the street and I can see that they’re thinking, Who the hell does she think she is?” Paranoia, an Alzheimer’s marker, is just beginning to get its grip on her. But she’s been lovely to the children all summer, which is reassuring. Her face lights up when they go into her sitting room. She pats her knee, like she used to; Millie’s five foot ten and can’t help laughing. “Now come and tell me all about it,” Nancy says. About what, she doesn’t specify. The girls are good with her, as Morris is always telling me. They’re patient, tolerant, don’t rise to verbal bait. They do things at Granny’s pace, taking her arm in theirs. “Come on, Gran. Let’s go and make Granddad some tea,” talking her through the operation step by step. “Put the tea bags in the pot now. In the pot, not the mug. That’s it. Right. Hot water next, can you manage the kettle okay? That’s the kettle. Yes. Here, let me.”
    Morris prefers television to conversation, or indeed anything, and it’s been this way for a long time. Depressed and immobile, he is master of the remote and flicks between channels with a desperate air. It’s like he can’t look away. Things are too awful in his present to contemplate them squarely. Because he’s so focused on his television day, Nancy’s life is frequently lonely. She can’t follow a television program any longer. She’s more interested in being with me, because—when running the household, at least—I appear to be doing things. She’s less keen on me when I’m writing or reading. “The men just sit there,” she tells me scornfully, unable to distinguish between one kind of sitting and another: one at his desk on his laptop and phone, consulting and earning, and the other in the armchair next to her, absorbed fifteen hours a day by the flickering screen. She follows me around. She wonders half a dozen times a day where the friends are, and if they are coming.
    “I don’t want the friends to know I’ve been ill,” she says, as we pick tomatoes in the greenhouse. She eats the ones she picks or puts them slyly in her pocket, thinking I haven’t seen. Or just picks the dried-out leaves from the plants and puts those in the basket, smoothing them carefully. Then she takes them out again. “I don’t think these are ready,” she’ll tell me, trying to fix them back on the trusses.
    The friends—imaginary friends—visit us sometimes, and she has days when she worries about how they’ll get here and how they’ll get home. In truth, her real friends have long deserted her, had deserted the two of them long before their move north. Desertion is a strong word; the truth is the process wasn’t so premeditated—it was a more gradual loss of attentiveness, a social slippage, the kind that happens when people get sick and have little to talk about other than their problems. Three from their old circle telephone from time to time, but it’s us they want to speak to, for reports.
    “I need to say good-bye,” Nancy insists, twisting her handkerchief. “I need to see the friends off.”
    “Don’t worry,” Chris says, trying to ease her agitation. “They’ve gone already. I saw them leave earlier.” And then, seeing her expression, he adds, “But they said to tell you they’d had a lovely day.”
    “Gone already? But they didn’t say